Healing Mass - Fr Damian Feeney

The Vice-Principal, Fr Damian Feeney, gave this homily at a Healing Mass organized by one of the pastoral groups in the College as part of their ongoing formation.

Healing is central to the Good News of Jesus Christ. Throughout the gospels there are countless healing stories. Some of these relate to physical healings – people who are physically sick or disabled, who experience physical healing and liberation. Other healings relate to a person’s inner state, including deliverance from unhealthy mental or spiritual conditions, or even – more rarely – genuine possession. Still further healings are less obvious – the healing of people caught in sin, the reconciliation which Jesus brings about between people who are at odds, the tranquillity which comes from acceptance. These healings are all marvellous signs from Jesus of God’s love, power and grace. And we should remember that the healing which Christ offers extends way beyond what he is prepared to do for those who open himself up to his grace without reservation or condition. This is the Christ who heals communities – how else did Ian Paisley and Martin McGuiness finally come together and say that enough was enough? This is the Christ who pours his balm on Soham and Dunblane, on Hungerford and Aberfan, through his grace, and through his solidarity with suffering as he sheds his blood on the cross. This is the Christ who breaks down barriers, such as the Berlin Wall, Apartheid in South Africa, and who we pray can bring the people of Zimbabwe back from the brink of despair. In the renewed understandings and imperatives concerning climate change and ecology, it is Christ whose grace and impetus seeks to heal and renew this tiny bit of the created order in the vastness of his glorious creation. With my heart I believe all those things, as surely as I believe in Christ’s capacity to heal me from my sin, my disfigurement, and all the things which hold me back from truly loving him.

When we come to God for healing, we are inviting him to be part of a process. That means a number of things. First of all, the healing we desire may not in fact be the healing we need. There is a story of a lady who heard that a healing service was planned in her parish, and she went and told the priest that she wouldn’t be coming as she didn’t believe in, or trust healing services. She then complained of a blinding headache which she’d had for a couple of days. The priest told her that nevertheless, at ten past eight he would offer intercessions for her healing. The next morning the Priest rang his parishioner to find out how she was. She said ‘I’m so glad I didn’t go to that nonsense last night. At ten past eight the telephone rang. It was my son – you didn’t know I had a son? Well – I don’t talk about him. He cleared off a few years ago and we had a row, and we haven’t been in touch at all since. Well, last night he rang – and said how sorry he was that he had fallen out – and to tell me about the grandchild I never knew I had, and to invite me to come and stay. Just as well that I didn’t fall for the healing thing. Anyway, your prayers didn’t work – I’ve still got the headache!

If we have expectations, it is as well to abandon them – and abandon them to God. When we ask God for healing, we are inviting the one who truly knows – and knows better than us – what we need. Very often the true cause or causes of illness and disease are not really clear to us, especially if they are tied to painful memories of things which have happened to us in the past. Healing might be a realisation that our pain is tied to one thing or another, and the grace and strength to do something about it. Healing might be true abandonment and acceptance of the way we are, recognising that God is still able to work in us far more than we can ask, expect, or think. Healing can be serenity for the stressed, peace for the broken hearted, comfort for the afflicted, mercy and forgiveness for those whose lives are blighted with wrongdoing.

There are numbers of ways in which God’s healing can be brought to bear, because it is something that God longs for. If that were not so, would Jesus have spent so much time healing others? The means of healing which are offered in this service are simple, biblical and have formed part of the tradition of the church since the days of Christ himself. Tonight in this Mass we are offered forgiveness If you want help guiding your prayers then that can also be offered as you seek God’s healing in your life. Maybe there is someone you would like especially to bring to God tonight – someone in need of healing - but can’t find quite the words you need and would like to be guided in your prayers. There will be two prayer stations available at the end of the Mass, where your will be assisted in your prayers by others if you so wish. In addition, all of us have the opportunity tonight to experience the ministry of the Laying on of hands and Anointing. This simply means that, according to ancient custom, hands are laid on the head whilst prayer is offered, and our heads and hands are anointed with oil according to ancient custom. Such signs, like those of the Mass, are real, available, and speak to us of the boundless grace of God. Thus tonight the church in this place seeks to enable the healing which Jesus came to bring among his people tonight. My prayer for you all, and for myself, so in need of his healing grace, is that tonight we will be open to this grace as never before, and that we will feel the fruits of Christ’s presence among us. He came to earth to heal creation, to heal the world, to heal his people. May he visit us tonight, and may we know his healing touch in our hearts, minds, souls, and lives.

Second before Advent - Dr John Jarick

Dr John Jarick, tutor in Old Testament at St Stephen's House, preached this sermon at Pusey House, Oxford.

A few years ago, in a series of art galleries around the world, there was a touring exhibition of the work of the Japanese artist On Kawara. The exhibition included two sets of books, entitled One Million Years (Past) and One Million Years (Future). I saw the display early in its tour, when it was at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, and I was struck, so to speak, by those particular volumes. Let me try to describe them to you.

Imagine, if you will, the set of digits that make up the figure 2001, and that accordingly symbolize one year, the first of our present millennium. Now imagine that figure followed by 2002, and then 2003, and then 2004, and so on. Let’s have these figures arranged in sequence across a large page, large enough for us to have ten years side by side, from 2001 to 2010. Then, underneath that line of figures which collectively represent a decade, let’s have another line that represents a further decade by means of the figures from 2011 to 2020, and then another line and so on until we have ten such lines of ten years each, at which point let’s leave one blank line — as a kind of paragraph spacing — in order that the century of dates that we’ve listed from 2001 to 2100 might be clearly delineated. After that visually-useful blank line we can move on through the years of the next century, and so on for the full length of the page, in all fifty lines of figures set out in five paragraphs of ten lines each, and all in ten columns. In that way, we have neatly listed on one page all the years from 2001 to 2500, a full five centuries of year-dates.

Good. But let’s not stop there. Let’s follow that page with one that sets out in the same neat arrangement all the prospective years from 2501 to 3000. In fact, let’s have those two pages facing each other in a double-page spread, and we can have an entire millennium of years spread out before us. And let’s carry on in the same way, with the potential years set out page after page, half-millennium after half-millennium, until we’ve reached one million years into the future, spread out over two thousand pages. If you can imagine all that, then you have imagined On Kawara’s work, One Million Years (Future), and you can similarly conceptualize his companion work, One Million Years (Past), which applies the same process to year-dates of the past, working its way back through the centuries to just two millennia short of the year One Million BC.

Well, it’s a thought-provoking experience to see such a list of years, even to imagine them. The artist out of whose initial imagination those books arose, On Kawara, has long been fascinated by the notion of the inexorable passing of time, and one wonders how much time it must have taken him to produce those pages and pages of time-symbols. But as you contemplate the seemingly endless columns of year-dates, you realize that in those terms your own life consists of only a few lines; that whole empires rose and fell within a single page; that all of recorded human history spans no more than a dozen or so pages. As the art critic Richard Dorment put it, “Suddenly, you have a tiny glimpse of the awesome expanse of time, a sense of your own brief flicker of life across a medium in which 20,000 years is but one chapter”.

Now some people might find that sort of contemplation rather unsettling. We perhaps prefer to think of ourselves as bestriding our times somewhat more majestically than a wide-angle lens might reveal to be the case. And for that matter it’s not always psychologically helpful for us to dwell on just how infinitesimal we might be in the grand scheme of things. But there are times when stepping out of the immediate time-frame in which we are caught up, and contemplating matters from what might be called a higher perspective, is very worthwhile indeed, and from time to time the Church in its wisdom invites us to step for a moment into a different kind of time-frame.

I’m referring to the fact that today’s Old Testament reading is taken from the book of Daniel, a book that has much to say about time, and yet its time-talk can seem almost incomprehensible to us. The creators of the book of Daniel sought to step out of their immediate time-frame, with their experiences of anguish and oppression, and to envision a broader sweep of virtually cosmic history. They tried to look beyond the moments of time in which they were buffeted and frustrated, to cast their eyes over the parapets towards what they call variously “the appointed time of the end” or “the decreed end” or simply “the time of the end”. On occasions they get caught up in speculation about supposedly precise lengths of time, speaking at one place of a period of “2,300 evenings and mornings”, or at another place of a period of “70 weeks”, or at yet another of a period of “1,290 days”, although they immediately change their minds about the last figure and recalibrate it as “1,335 days” instead, all of which has provided seemingly fertile ground for naïve souls ever since to keep trying to calculate and recalculate “the time of the end” from the figures in the book of Daniel (combined, of course, with selected figures from the book of Revelation). But the overall time-talk of Daniel, stated near the beginning and again near the end of the catalogue of visions, is thoroughly imprecise and enigmatic: How long shall the evil empire stand? “For a time, times, and half a time.” How long shall it be until the end of the wonders partly spoken of in today’s reading? “For a time, times, and half a time.”

Right, so that’s clear, then. The compilers of the book of Daniel didn’t know, any more than you or I do, the time of the end. They couldn’t even be sure how long they were to be caught up in the particular epoch of time in which they found themselves. They knew that they were living in a time of incessant warfare, a time when the latest set of imperial authorities that were constantly angling for control of the land of Judah had abolished the normal worship services at the temple in Jerusalem and had erected an offensive pagan statue at that very site. In the thick of that experience, it must have seemed to some that the clouds would never lift. But for others, our Daniel scribes among them, the eye of faith and hope, though it cannot know the precise timings even when it yearns to know them, does see something of a bigger time-scale than the moment-by-moment drudgery and anguish that can so easily get on top of us when the world seems hell-bent on a godless path. And for one glorious moment, those scribes broke right out of all our normally-understood time-frames when they proclaimed:

“At that time Michael, the great prince, the protector of your people, shall arise. There shall be a time of anguish, such as has never occurred since nations first came into existence. But at that time your people shall be delivered, everyone who is found written in the book. Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever.” [Daniel 12:1-3]

Now that’s what I call an earth-shattering vision. It steps right outside of the box of general Old Testament thinking, and puts forward for the first time the idea of resurrection, an idea that earlier parts of the Hebrew scriptures hadn’t dared to canvas but an idea whose time had come. Pharisees and Sadducees might disagree about it later, but no one could ignore it any longer. It was Daniel chapter 12 verse 2 that established the concept of resurrection within biblical religion, both Jewish and Christian, and in hearing it read here today we too step for a moment outside of our normal time coordinates.

Just for a moment, though. The Church doesn’t want us to get caught up in fruitless end-time speculation, and so it devotes only three minutes every three years to reading from the book of Daniel in Sunday worship, about a minute today and about two minutes next Sunday. Then we’ll close Daniel for another three years — the same amount of time, incidentally, that it took the exhibition of the work of On Kawara to move from gallery to gallery on its three-year circuit of the world.

We don’t know how many three-year cycles will pass before the end comes. Perhaps it will be infinitely more than the million years that Kawara has set down on paper in the pages of his work One Million Years (Future), or perhaps it will be appreciably less than that. “The End” in any grand sense certainly seems to have been considerably longer than Daniel’s contemporaries could have imagined that “a time, times, and half a time” could last, just as there have been far more “times of anguish” for Daniel’s people and for the world in general than they could have predicted. But yet the final words of the book of Daniel are surely words that we can still take to heart so many years after they were written and no matter how many years may yet remain: “Happy are those who persevere.... You shall rise for your reward at the end of days.”

At that time, according to today’s reading, “Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky”. May we too be wise, and in due time we too will shine brightly.

All Souls - Ian Boxall

Today is a difficult day for many. The Feast of All Souls invites us to call to mind precious loved ones who are no longer with us, some long gone, others only very recently departed. And that can be a difficult thing. All Souls can be a day which opens up those still raw wounds of loss, as well as evoking feelings of gratitude for those who have been so influential in our lives. It reminds us that the process of bereavement is not at all straightforward or predictable, nor necessarily something short-lived. But lest we are in danger of reducing All Souls Day to an occasion for family reminiscence and grief, however real that that may be, we need to remind ourselves that today’s celebration is worked out on a far bigger canvas. What we are acknowledging today, above all, is that there are countless millions of the departed who are no longer remembered by name, still less by face, and yet whom the Church gathers up in prayer on this particular day. Millions who have gone before, whose faith is known to God alone, and who we assist through our prayers and our sacrifices and especially through our celebration of Mass.

A few months after my father died, a friend recommended that I read C.S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed, a book Lewis wrote as he struggled to come to terms with the death of his wife Joy. It is not a book which works for every bereaved person, but it worked for me. At one point relatively early in his book, Lewis makes the following observation about his memory of his wife:

I have no photograph of her that’s any good. I cannot even see her face distinctly in my imagination. Yet the odd face of some stranger seen in a crowd this morning may come before me in vivid perfection the moment I close my eyes tonight (C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed [London: Faber and Faber, 1966], p. 15).

What is most shocking to Lewis is his inability to remember his wife’s face, that most recognizable facet of the human person. She has slipped away from him bodily, and now she appears in danger of slipping away visually. What we are doing tonight, however, is rooted in the conviction that our dead do not slip away. We are acknowledging that God remembers, that God does not let go, and that even if the faithful departed are far from our minds and we struggle to recall their faces, their personalities, even their names, God remembers them. God sees them. God holds them.

Yet to many in our society, our commemoration this evening is a meaningless exercise, or worse than that a massive delusion. This is where our first reading from the Book of Wisdom is so helpfully contemporary in its freshness and its insights, and particularly as we ponder the faithful departed in that interim state of discipline, purification and transformation.

The opening chapters of the Book of Wisdom juxtapose for us two irreconcilable world views. On the one hand, there is the view espoused by those the author of Wisdom calls ‘the ungodly’. For them, life is not only short and sorrowful, but utterly meaningless. These are the people who say: ‘For we were born by mere chance, and hereafter we shall be as though we had never been’ (Wisdom 2:2). In such a world-view, physical death means the destruction of the body and the dissolution of the spirit. Worse than that, it means that any memory of our existence will eventually be erased from this earth: ‘Our name will be forgotten in time, and no one will remember our works; our life will pass away like the traces of a cloud, and be scattered like mist that is chased by the rays of the sun …’ (Wisdom 2:4). So what this world has to offer is all that there is, and it has to be grasped at (2:6) rather than received as a gift, with no concern for its consequences, because there is no final judgement.

On the other hand, there is the world-view of ‘the righteous one’, who faces ridicule and worse for his misguided beliefs. In this alternative description of reality, death does not mean the ultimate disintegration of our personhood, still less the forgetting of our name or our deeds. Nor is death the punishment it might appear to be to others. Rather, even in death, and beyond death, reality is sustained by the one whose remembering alone matters: ‘But the souls of the righteous are in the hands of God, and no torment will ever touch them. In the eyes of the foolish they seem to have died, and their departure was thought to be a disaster, and their going from us to be their destruction; but they are at peace’ (Wisdom 3:1-3, italics mine).

So today, on this Commemoration of the Faithful Departed, we remember; but more importantly, we celebrate the fact that God remembers, and holds the souls of the righteous in his hands. Or to put it another way, we celebrate the fact that God loves, and that the divine bonds of love are far stronger than those human bonds of love which cause us to remember our loved ones. Which brings us to our gospel for today. Our gospel passage is part of Jesus’ discourse on the Bread of Life, which follows on from the feeding of the five thousand. At the end of that miracle, Jesus had commanded his disciples to gather up all the fragments of uneaten bread and fish, ‘so that nothing may be lost’ (John 6:12). Those scraps which might otherwise be trampled underfoot, or left on the ground to rot, are carefully and purposefully preserved. So now, as Jesus interprets that feeding miracle in his sermon, he recalls that gathering up of the fragments. ‘And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day’ (John 6:39).

Of course, it is possible to place a minimalist interpretation on our gospel. Those whom the Father has given the Son, we might argue, are a very select group. Yet there is a strand running throughout John which urges a more optimistic reading. It is rooted in that fundamental conviction that God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him should have eternal life. It is possible to reject this gift, to prefer the security of the darkness to the vulnerability of the light. But the divine yearning for the gathering up of the fragments remains. God desires to gather. God desires to hold the souls of the righteous in his hand. But that is only the next stage in the journey. Ultimately, God to desires to raise us up on the last day. That is what we are praying for tonight.

All Saints - Fr Damian Feeney

This sermon was preached at Worcester College, Oxford, on the feast of All Saints 2009 by the Vice-Principal, Fr Damian Feeney.

First of all, thank you for the kind invitation to be with you this evening as we celebrate the Communion of Saints. Part of the difficulty with this feast is that it’s actually quite difficult to define, as it were, the terms of the engagement. On one level, today is about those who have attained to the beatific vision in Heaven: those whose self-emptying enables Christ’s presence to increase, while ego decreases; and whose lives are lives of many dimensions, lived to the full, since they are lives lived in full consciousness of God’s grace, mercy and glory.

Throughout the church’s year we learn of the qualities and stories of specific saints throughout the church’s year, seeing those lives as reflections of the glory of Christ himself; and then tonight we consider the Saints en masse, in what Eric Milner-White referred to as the multitude which none can number – a glorious image which resonates within Isaiah’s vision of new heavens, a new earth - words later on re-stated in the book of Revelation.

Within that multitude we celebrate not only those whose sanctity is well known to the church on earth, but also those whose saintliness is known to God alone, or who, whilst lacking the formal processes of canonization, have been saintly people in local communities, familiar contexts, perhaps in our own personal stories. So we are drawn to a more general reflection upon the nature of holiness itself – of what it means to be holy, both in the contexts of history and in the confusions of the present day.

All these lives – the well known, the un-remembered, the half-acknowledged – are lives lived out in response to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, the image of the invisible God. Many good, holy and faithful men and women came before Christ, and in their way point to him, but they were lives lived in messianic hope rather than a sense of response to Christ’s witness. Isaac Watts, who penned the memorable words for tonight’s anthem, reminds us of the truth that saints point to Jesus;

We ask them whence their victory came,
They, with one united breath,
Ascribe the conquest to the Lamb,
Their triumph to his death.

That’s all well and good, and saints form a considerable part of the connection between Jesus’ story and ours; we are sustained by stories of saintly living, whether they be distant or closer to home, because they are stories shaped by Jesus’ story; we cheerfully acknowledge that, human nature being what it is, the fact and detail about a saint’s life can become obscured over time by legend and embroidery in much the same way that we treat the cult of celebrity today. Maybe we don’t mind that too much, since it’s part of our essential recognition of the saint – and therefore a sign of love – to treat them in this way.

Perhaps we should also pause at this point to acknowledge that the doings and dealings of the saints are not always popular: holiness can, in some forms, be a downright irritant. I think it was Clive James who once observed ‘You can always tell a person who lives for others by the looks on the faces of the others.’

If that’s true, then the appeal of the saint is far from unconditional. Sanctity is attractive to some, unappealing to others. To some the way of the saint stands in the way of freedom rather than pointing to it. Newman’s portrayal of the demons in The Dream of Gerontius paints the saint as antithetical to the notion of independent thinking and intellectual freedom for which an august College such as this self-evidently stands. Newman penned these words for the demon’s mouths:

The mind bold and independent,
The purpose free,
So we are told, must not think to have the ascendant
What's a saint? One whose breath doth the air taint before his death;
A bundle of bones, which fools adore...when life is o'er;

These are words which still resonate, given the recent visit of the relics of St. Therese of Lisieux to this country and city. Here relics were accorded the kind of attention normally only given to those at the height of celebrity – an estimated 300,000 visitors across the country – and, according to one pilgrim interviewed by the Times Online, (and clearly anxious to plug in to the prevailing zeitgeist,) ‘She’s got the X Factor.’

To others, she was indeed a bundle of bones, adored by fools. In contemporary Britain, this is the theme which will not go away. That which is holy to some is mistrusted in a new and overt way by others in a way which would have been unthinkable even ten years ago. It is a debate being conducted freely, in newspapers and on the internet, on radio and television, on the shelves of Blackwells and (no doubt) in common rooms.

The task of defining sanctity today is therefore, as ever, a challenging one. On one level, the counter cultural nature of sanctity means that it is what it has always been – an appeal to the divine, defying opposing tides and currents, to risking unpopularity, or worse. It’s well known that there were more Martyrs created in the last century than in any other before it – we at St. Stephen’s House were reminded of this last week as we commemorated those who lost their lives during the Armenian Genocide of 1915 – an historical event which receives relatively little attention when compared to the Holocaust or to Stalinist Purges, but where over one million Christians lost their lives.

We should remember, too, that Martyrs, in many instances, died not only at the hands of those who wished to kill Christianity, but also at the hands of fellow Christians in conflict and disagreement. Oxford is full of examples of the holy who chose their historical period less wisely, whether you gravitate to Ridley, Latimer and Cranmer, or Nichols, Yaxley, Belson and Pritchard. All of them encountered an understanding that matters of faith and belief were important – that they, alongside of the political trends of the day, were the things which shaped lives, and were sufficiently important to need to silence those who pointed in another direction. Today’s church is operating in a very different context, where apathy and open ridicule are more likely to be the response.

One indispensible trait in the genuinely holy is a disturbing, prophetic edge which can lead to uncomfortable encounter. To try to follow Christ at all is an invitation out of places of comfort into wilderness places: the saints are those who, in word and action, showed an integration of living and believing in which no part of their lives were immune from God, where nothing was held back, where the free response sought to equal the measure of God’s generous gift in Christ. Their words, lives, deeds and writings beckon humanity out of the darkness of soulless, inanimate living into the fullness of life which is the very glory of God.

Saints are good for all of us, whether we are of faith or not. For the faithful, they point to the very root of our being, who is God himself. For the seeker after truth, they remind us that in a celebrity – ridden world of narcissism and veneer they represent the humility which lies at the heart of all compassionate human dialogue. Their calling is, of course, the calling of all Christian people – God’s desire that we should be numbered among them, living signs of the reality of His presence, activity and love in his world. May their lives, their witnesses, and their prayers surround our steps as we journey on, until Christ is all in all.

All Saints - Fr Andrew Davison

This homily was given by Fr Andrew Davison at both Fairacres Convent and St Stephen's House on this year's Solemnity of All Saints.

I begin this sermon, uncharacteristically, with reference to an electronica remix of a speech by Winston Churchill. I have an MTh student to thank for this particular piece of music, of a kind so far outside my listening habits that I really have no idea how to begin to describe it.

It works with Churchill’s 1941 speech to the allied delegates. ‘Every stain of [Hitler’s] insipid, corroding fingers’ intones the prime minister against what I take to be a drum and bass background ‘will be sponged and purged’. What a perfect beginning, I thought, for the sermon I want to preach on All Saints’ Day.

Except that Churchill did not talk about Hitler’s insipid fingers. He did not say ‘insipid’ but rather ‘infected’. All the same, he could have said ‘insipid fingers’. That would have been startling, but true. It would also have served my purposes better. It is not the infection of evil that I take as my theme today, but rather that evil is insipid and goodness is the opposite. Evil is insubstantial and goodness is solid.

Today we celebrate the saints. We celebrate holiness, and with holiness we celebrate fullness of being and solidity of personhood.

God is good, and God is real. To share God’s goodness is to share his reality. Quite simply, to be holy is to be more real. This is not a statement that would go down well in Oxford’s philosophy faculty, but it is true. To be holy is to be more real. It is theme that has been explored in quite a bit of Christian art and literature.

Take, for instance, The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis. In that book, goodness is so real, and evil is so insipid, that when the residents of hell take a day-trip to heaven the grass there cuts their feet. Even the grass of heaven is weightier than those who have chosen to make themselves evil.

As another example, think of the ring wraiths in The Lord of the Rings. After years of evil they are hardly there any more, just shadows beneath their cloaks. That is more, the ring wraiths are almost indistinguishable. Evil is dull. It blunts the edge of God-given individuality.

The evil of the ring wraiths has reduced them to the level of the same. Goodness does exactly the opposite. Goodness makes thing more what they are, not less, more individual, not less.

Nowhere is this more obvious than with the saints, whom we celebrate today. There is no more diverse and characterful collection of people than the company of saints. The saints are individual, different, interesting.

Fra Angelico knew a thing or two about sanctity. He is a saint himself, or at least a blessed. He made the point about the characterfulness of holiness clear in his paintings. You will find at the top of [this post] a reproduction of part of one of his paintings. The original is in the National Gallery in London. It shows the saints around Christ enthroned in glory. What I love about this picture is that the saints are so individual, so characterful, so full of particularity. They abound with being, reality and character. This is exactly right.

The great Catholic composer Olivier Messiaen wrote only one opera. It was about a saint, St Francis of Assisi. It wasn’t like many operas people had heard before. Messiaen was tackled about this. There is disappointingly little sin in your work, Monsieur Messiaen. His reply: ‘sin isn’t interesting, dirt isn’t interesting. I prefer flowers. I left out sin.' [Sin isn't interesting. I prefer flowers The Guardian 29 August 2008].

Sin isn’t interesting. This is an important point. We protest against violence in film or on television. We object to obscenity in broadcasting. Rightly so. But it is just as problematic that evil is glamorised in films and on television. The truth is entirely the opposite. There is nothing glamorous about evil. As Messiaen said, ‘sin is boring’. Goodness is interesting. [Weil, Simon Gravity and Grace, pp. 62-3].

Moving on, as our reading from Wisdom put it just now, only to the foolish do God’s holy ones seem to have died. Really, ‘their hope is full of immortality’. Whilst evil saps life; goodness confirms it. Holiness, we might say, is healthy. Sanctity conquers death.I once had exactly this conversation with the wife of a student at Merton. I was working on my DPhil and I got involved with leading an Alpha course. It seemed this thing might involve rather an idiosyncratic take on the Christian Faith. I thought it would be wise if I got in on the team that organised it. It’s amazing how much you can do by opening questions after the video with the line ‘well what do you think? Did that make any sense at all?’

One Alpha session fell on the Feast of St Alban and I made some comment about St Alban praying for us. ‘How on earth can he pray for us?’, the other Alpha leader asked, ‘he’s dead!’

Perhaps impertinently – she was a consultant anaesthetist – I replied ‘you are wrong because you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God … [God] is God not of the dead, but of the living’. Only to the foolish to the saints seem to have died. They are full of life because they are full of goodness – they are full of the life of Christ, which can withstand death. The saints have a fullness of being which death cannot touch.

In that holiness, in that tangible reality, God is with us. Some time ago, in first century Palestine, God was with us, walking the earth. In the life of the world to come, ‘the home of God’ will be among mortals, as we are promised in our second reading. Now, in between, God is present with us in the Blessed Sacrament and he is present with us by his Holy Spirit. Nowhere is the presence of the Holy Spirit more obvious than in the holiness of the saints. In them we encounter the presence of God with us; we encounter in the reality of their holiness the reality of God.

Evil is dull and same-ish. Goodness is interesting and full of individuality. The evil men and women of history were insipid – even if Winston Churchill didn’t quite say it. Evil, though it blights our world, is insubstantial. Goodness, however, is solid. Goodness is joyful. It is so real that it hits you in the face. To this the saints bear witness.

My favourite saint put it rather well ‘the goodness of the good is stronger than evil in its wickedness’ [Virtuosius est bonum in bonitate quam in malitia maulm. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles III.7.6].

Mariology of St Anselm (vii) - Canon Robin Ward

This is the final part of Canon Ward's 2009 Assumptiontide Lecture at the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham:

Eadmer in his first treatise On the Excellence of the Virgin Mary remains close to the doctrine of his mentor: not yet able to account for an immaculist position in terms which did justice to the strict necessity for the Incarnation, he is satisfied with the Anselmian precept that the Virgin should shine with a purity which was only exceeded by God’s own. However, by the time he comes to write specifically about the conception of the Virgin in the 1120s, he is determined to press the argument from congruity beyond Anselm’s argument for a purification of Mary by divine action in the womb to a full exemption from original sin. In doing so he employs the striking and somewhat esoteric analogy of the chestnut: just as the chestnut is conceived and grown amid spines which do it no harm, so God is able in preparing a temple for his dwelling to ensure that though this body be conceived among the spines of sin, it would be completely unharmed by their sharp points. Eadmer concludes by stating of God: Potuit plane et voluit; si igitur voluit, fecit [Eadmer of Canterbury, Tractatus de conceptione Sanctae Mariae, PL 159, cc. 305-6], a remarkable anticipation by two centuries of the Scotist formula Potuit, decuit, ergo fecit. It was this treatise which when ascribed by mistake to Anselm enjoyed a wide and authoritative circulation during the immaculist debates of the high middle ages, and was prescribed in portions under Anselm’s name for liturgical recitation by the Council of Basle when it made observance of the feast of the Virgin’s conception mandatory in 1438 [Southern, Anselm, p. 436]. Eadmer with great intellectual acumen chose to defend the inchoate Marian instinct of his nation with the subtle dialectic of the new theology, and was amply rewarded for his ingenuity.

Anselm is no Bernard as a Marian theologian: in his character as a monk he was content to work within the customary strictures and restraints of the Benedictine life he had weighed gravely as his vocation as a young man and then accepted under the measured tutelage of Herluin the founder of Bec, and Lanfranc his intellectual mentor. Because he instigated no reform of the religious life as a counterpoint to the novel sensibility of his affective devotion, Anselm neither sought nor achieved the dissemination of his own religious ethos which Bernard inspired with the Cistercian movement. His influence was confined to a small circle of admiring disciples: his fellow monks at Bec and Canterbury; the noble women such as the Conqueror’s daughter Adelaide and Mathilda of Tuscany who possessed the leisure, the literacy and the consciousness of their own interior life to cultivate the spirituality of compunction which the Prayers and Meditations seek to evoke. Of his corpus of writings, the most original and incisive of any since Augustine, only three prayers address the Virgin, and of them only the last by his own admission satisfies the quest of his faith for a true understanding. Why then is this body of work so significant?

We must not suppose that Anselm anticipates a sort of Anglican reserve about Marian doctrine and devotion: we know from the records of his conversation that he and his brethren had an entirely contemporary taste for the newly popular collections of miracles of the Virgin, and he invoked her himself in time of peril with freedom and confidence. Even if his own doctrine of the atonement and original sin led him to reject the celebration of the Virgin’s conception, he is entirely faithful to the Augustinian inheritance of the Latin West in refusing to countenance any mention of actual sin in relation to Mary, and those most close to him, Anselm of Bury and Eadmer of Canterbury, build confidently on his foundations to endorse not only the old English liturgical tradition but the most controversial tenet of the new Marianism itself, the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. What makes Anselm’s prayers to the Virgin so remarkable and so innovative in the development of Latin ascetic theology is their intimate confidence in Marian advocacy and mediation: antithesis and paradox call him back time and again to the Christological context of salvation history, but for the pilgrim sinner in via, the Lady whose undisputed pureness is the shame of the penitent, is the same Lady whose suckling of the eternal Word gives her a paramountcy of intercessory power which applies without fail to the sinner the work of her divine Son. We see in this confident, affective, individualist piety a spirit at work which culminates in the theme of Marian servitude and the cultus of the hearts of Jesus and Mary which is so remarkable feature of the revival of Catholic spirituality in Europe in the aftermath of the Council of Trent. And may we not also see, even as Anselm writes and prays in his cell at Bec and at Canterbury, a similar spirit moving Richeldis to build a house for the Mother of God here, in the land appointed to be her dowry?

Mariology of St Anselm (vi) - Canon Robin Ward

The liturgical celebration of the conception of the Virgin Mary was politically as well as theologically sensitive at the time when Anselm was Archbishop of Canterbury. The event of Mary’s conception receives legendary attention in the Protevangelium, which is thought to be of second century origin, and there is some evidence for liturgical commemoration in the East from the end of the seventh century and shortly afterwards in Ireland. However, it is in eleventh century England that the feast of the Virgin’s conception first appears as a well established observance on the 8^th December [Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique 7.1, cc. 989-993]. Following the conquest, Archbishop Lanfranc, Anselm’s predecessor both at Canterbury and as abbot of Bec and his teacher in youth, embarked on a reform to suppress certain perceived peculiarities which had emerged in the English church regarding liturgical observances and the marriage of the clergy, and the feast of the conception of the Virgin was among those lost. The English fought back with some guile and persistence to rescue their rich liturgical inheritance of saints and commemorations, and by the second decade of the twelfth century much had been done to restore the salient features of this pre-conquest insular cultus. This was most notable in the great monastic centres such as Westminster, Ramsey and Bury: indeed, Anselm’s own nephew and namesake was instrumental in restoring the feast of the Virgin’s conception when he became abbot of Bury [Richard Southern, Anselm of Canterbury, A Portrait in a Landscape, p. 434].

Two literary sources in particular stand out: the first is a letter dating from about 1085 describing how Elsi, the abbot of Ramsey, was rescued from a storm at sea by the Virgin on condition he promote the feast of her conception [J P Migne, Patrologia Latina 159, cc. 323-6]; the second is the treatise De Conceptione Beatae Mariae by Eadmer of Canterbury, monk, hagiographer of the old English saints and author of the Vita Anselmi. The names Elsi and Eadmer betray the English origin of the principal protagonists here and indicate the limited ambition behind the conduct of the controversy: this is an attempt by the conquered to justify the immemorial usages of their churches. Eadmer was both an assiduous compiler of all that pertained to the pre-conquest saints of Canterbury and a querulous critic of the exclusion of his countrymen from ecclesiastical office in favour of foreigners. However, what began as a rearguard action to defend the local English tradition of Marian piety soon became part of an international theological controversy about the Virgin’s exemption from original sin, a controversy which the attachment of Anselm’s name as author to both the letter and the treatise momentously transformed. This was because S. Bernard, mellifluous doctor of the Virgin’s privileges even as he was, specifically denied that Mary was preserved from original sin at her conception when he heard that the canons of Lyons had introduced the celebration of the festival into their church in 1138 [Bernard of Clairvaux, Ad Canonicos Lugdunenses Ep. 174, PL 182, c. 332]. What had begun as an exercise in English ecclesiastical antiquarianism now became a fissure within the new Marianism which was to persist throughout the scholastic period and in which the name of Anselm quoted as an authority was to carry great weight even into the nineteenth century.

Anselm himself appears not to have accepted the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception insofar as it had a concrete formulation in his day, and he treats it only incidentally. In Cur Deus Homo he states clearly: the Virgin of whom he was taken was conceived ‘amid iniquities’ and her mother ‘conceived’ her ‘in sin’, and she was born with original sin since she sinned in Adam ‘in whom all have sinned’ [Cur Deus Homo 16, in Anselm of Canterbury, The Major Works, p. 337]. However, in De Virginali conceptu et de peccato originali, he describes the virgin as having been cleansed by faith before conceiving her divine Son, and also states that although it is true that the Son of God was born of a spotless Virgin, this was not out of necessity, as if a just offspring could not be generated by this method of propagation from a sinful parent, but because it was fitting that the conception of this man should be of a pure mother [De Virginali conceptu 18, in Anselm, Major Works, p. 376]. This argument from fittingness subsequently becomes one of the principal tools used by Eadmer and those who succeed him in defence of the full doctrine of the Immaculate Conception to justify their position. Anselm understood original sin as an absence of original justice in consequence of Adam’s disobedience, which meant that human free will has an impeded capacity to choose the good and a propensity to choose evil which exists in potentiality from conception but does not actually come into effect until the age of reason. This account of the doctrine is more patient of an immaculist interpretation of the Virgin’s privilege at conception than the Augustinian emphasis on the transmission of original sin by the concupiscent process of procreation.